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| View of the Catholic Church in St-Evariste, Quebec (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Front of Roman Catholic church, Ubay, Bohol, Philippines (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
BBC World today broadcast a
programme that drew attention to the parlous state of the Philippines, in which
a quarter of their 100 million people live below the poverty line --- which is
to say they live in the most abject poverty.
The interviewer, Stephen
Sackur, interviewed a woman of 30 who, married at 17, had borne 11 children. Asked
if she had had a choice in the matter, she said she would have had three.
Sackur, by implication, put a great deal of the blame for this on the Roman
Catholic Church and the hold it has over Filipinos.
But hang on a mnute --- we can
illustrate this same story, closer to home.
In the 1980s I wrote a book,
called Life of the Party, about a
French-Canadian friend of mine, Gerard Fortin, who, born in 1923, told me the
first strong memory he had in life was of an occasion after the death of his
mother at the age of 29. She had married at 17, and just like the woman in
contemporary Manila, she had borne 11 children before dying, wornout from
child-bearing. In those days, the local priest --- usually a man assigned to a
parish in which he stayed for most of his lifetime, without whose advice no family made decisions --- had called his parishioners together at
Sunday service, instructing them it was their duty to take care of the children
of the recently-deceased member of his flock. So Gerry remembered how they had
all been dressed in their best clothes, lined up in the tiny farmhouse which
was their home, as the parishioners from the same rang of farmhouses populated by semi-literate people like Gerry’s
family, came in and said, “I will take this one,” or “I’ll take the baby,” or
“Let me have the eldest boy.” And so the family was distributed around the rang, where they mostly lived as
unhappy, half-accepted appendages to the already large families of the local
farmers and their wives.
Gerry went to school, effectively,
for three years, learning how to read, but not how to write. He was a boy
curious about the world, and he made a habit of going to a neighbouring farmer
every evening and reading the newspaper to him aloud.
In this way he struggled into
puberty, barely educated, unprepared to undertake any role in life, and it
became inevitable that when he reached the age of 15 or so he joined the winter
exodus of 100,000 similar youths and men from Quebec villages into the endless
forests to their north to work as bushworkers
in appalling conditions for companies owned either by Americans or by
English-Canadians.
The similarity with the
Philippines goes deeper than just the high birthrate: to all intents and
purposes, the French-Canadian population of Quebec was kept by the Church and
its priests in a condition which made it inevitable that the only role they
were capable of playing in the developing industrialization of the province was
at the lowest, poorest-paid level of labourer and navvy. Of course, as in all
such societies, there was a local elite that could afford good schools and all
the rest of it for its children, but in the 1950s Quebec still bore the marks
of a priest-ridden, downtrodden society unable to lift itself on to its feet.
The Church, of course, had done
a remarkable job in ensuring the survival of French-speaking people in North
America. After the English turned out victorious in the battle for North America,
most of the French-speaking elite returned to France, leaving the 70,000
ordinary people to be ministered to by their Church. In what is still called to
this day “the revenge of the cradle”, the Church encouraged their flock to have
as many children as possible, so that those 70,000 people grew to today’s total
of almost eight million in Quebec, another million who are said to have
migrated to other provinces, and some five million who over the years, left
Quebec to live in New England and other parts of the United States. This is an
astonishing result by any standards.
Unfortunately, the Church which
directed and inspired this great effort was extremely reactionary, and although
it was in complete control of the education system until 1960, it suspected technical,
scientific and modern education to such an extent that the pupils it turned out
from its schools were unfitted to take part in the growth of a society that,
along with others across North America, was evolving, industrializing and requiring
more of its citizens.
Naturally, this was not
occurring without opposition. When I first moved to Montreal in 1957 I came immediately
into contact with French-Canadian journalists who one could say were seething
with indignation at the impact the Church was having on their society, and were
desperate to find a way to change it once and for all. By this time, of course,
Quebecers had built a vigorous union movement, whose leaders also were as
determined to bring their society into line with neighbouring North American
jurisdictions, as were similar leaders elsewhere.
Nevertheless, although the account
I have written above may paint too broad a brush of the backwardness of Quebec
society at that time, it is true in its major aspects. Years later I made a film about a Quebec
farming family half of whose members went to Alberta to become French-speaking
citizens there on the land in an atmosphere that, their priest hoped, would
free them from the dangers of the technical education to which he feared they
were falling prey in Quebec. He issued
this instruction to his parishioners in a document which astounded me: in the
early 1950s he spoke of technical education as a sort of evil incarnate, as of
all the accompanying features of society built upon it. He left it to his
parishioners to decide which of them should emigrate west and which stay in
Quebec, but he left them in no doubt that this was their duty. And so ---
extraordinarily, when one looks at it from the eyes of today --- they loyally
carried out his instructions, went to Alberta, and there, outsiders in an
English-speaking world, they had created their own settlements, built their own
farms and institutions, and were bringing up families of young people who --- a
great irony this, surely --- had become bilingual, and were free of all
aspirations to the separate national status that their cousins left behind in
Quebec were being swept by.
When I got to know people of my
own generation in Montreal I discovered that most of them came from families of
twelve, fourteen, even in some cases sixteen children. But they themselves were
having only two or three children. Their opposition to the dictates of the
Church had already started before the change of government in 1960 swept away
remnants of the old religious societal controls. Within a generation or so, a
society that had been completely priest-ridden had freed themselves from this
anachronistic religion. I cannot swear to this figure, but I seem to remember
than in the 1950s some 18,000 nuns, priests and others of the kind were in
residence in the man seminaries and convents in Montreal. Today most of these
have been sold, and the Church is finding it increasingly difficult, for want
of acolytes, to keep even those few that remain in operation.
Stephen Sackur interviewed
agents who propagate family planning in the wasteland of Manila. When he
mentioned the policy of abstention favoured by the Catholic hierarchy, they
immediately demurred, saying it was useless, that, indeed, the Catholics were
the main problem they had to deal with in their efforts to reduce the birthrate
so that adults could begin to live a more productive and decent life on the few
resources they had. One of these women said she and her husband used condoms,
and did not consider themselves poorer Catholics for that reason; and the other
said she had been sterilized, and similarly considered herself a loyal
Catholic.
Someone should tell these people
that the negative controls exercised by the Church can be shucked off, if only the
parishioners are ready to do it. And that this has been proven in Quebec, which
today has one of the lowest birthrates of any jurisidiction in North America.
And that Quebec society has, in the half century they have been exercising
their personal freedoms, made significant achievements that have earned them fame
and fortune on a world scale, and in many different disciplines --- arts, as
well as business, science as well as philosophy.
It’s as easy as pie, if only
you can get rid of the Church.
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